WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Hillsdale Interview: Megan Brock

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

The Daily Caller's Megan Brock joined WRFH to discuss a series a stories from an investigation into Members of The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) - the leading authority in the field of transgender medicine - were caught on camera privately contradicting publicly touted standards for transgender treatment to push controversial sex-change procedures on patients. From 06/12/24.

You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Michaela Estruth. With me today is an author at Daily Color News Foundation, Megan Brock. Megan Brock is a writer for Daily Color News, and she, during the COVID pandemic, opposed the exclusion of children from schools and was sued five times by her local government, which attempted to hide the public records.

She now lives with her husband and two children in South Carolina. Megan, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. So in May, you wrote an article for Daily Color News, and I'm going to read the title of it. It's the W-Path tapes behind-the-scenes recordings reveal what top gender doctors really think about sex change procedures. And Megan's here to talk about it with us. So to start off, I was wondering you said in your article that most people aren't familiar with W-Path.

Can you explain what that stands for, what they are for the general audience? Yeah, so W-Path is the World Professional Association. of Transgender Health, and they are a medical, professional medical organization that has been around since 1979. And one of the biggest things that they do is they publish clinical guidance called the Standards of Care that are used as a reference and really undergird so many of the different transgender documents that you see from various medical associations. They're also really used by, utilized by governments, by insurance companies to tell people what, what quote unquote care, what medical interventions they should be giving for those who are struggling with gender distress. So they're really kind of underpin the whole sex change industry. Wow. Okay. So diving into the topic of the article in your investigation, what did you find on them? Yeah. So what we uncovered was through a public records request.

we uncovered almost 30 hours of recordings that were educational recordings that were utilized in their transgender health certification program. So W-Path is a membership organization, and within that, if you've been a member in good standing for two years, you can get this special certification to be transgender certified. So we uncovered these tapes that were private. They were not meant to our knowledge for public release. And in those tastes, we just heard doctors and various experts really speaking openly about some of the questions they have in terms of what are the long-term impacts of this care. One of the big things that stuck out to me was talking about how language creates social change because we know so much of transgender ideology is really a battle of language with this term gender identity, which isn't real, it's made up. But that's what we're seeing used in, for example, the Title IX battle that's going right now. So we saw a lot of that.

And just, I mean, one of the articles I wrote was about the surgeries and learning about the complications and how these patients, once these children really, once they begin this path of being medicalized, it leads down to from puberty blockers to cross-ex hormones to surgery. And they really become a medical patient for life. Wow. Okay. So how did you get access to the videos? Did you guys, like, become a member or how did that work? So that was through, what we did is this document, the Standards of Care, has, I believe, over 100 co-authors. So I went through all of the authors and located which authors worked at public universities.

So if anyone in your audience, if they know anything about public records, basically any government agency is required to abide by open record transparency laws. And so there's the federal transparency laws, but then every state has their own transparency laws. So I submitted a request, kind of just really we wanted to capture, see if we could capture any of the discussions about the standards of care, why they, how they were written, how they came to these conclusions, because there hasn't really been a lot known about the organization despite being how influential they are. And so in that, one of the responsive records, we actually got a link back to a Dropbox file that had all of these videos, and that's how we obtained them. So what's said in the videos, how does that correspond to how doctors are actually acting and communicating patient to patient? Well, I think one of the important things about these series, and the videos are actually all public. If you go to the Daily Call News Foundation's YouTube channel, you can watch all the presentations. And I think one of the things that's very distinct about these tapes is that these are their top experts speaking.

So these aren't, this isn't just like the people who are presenting are respected in the field of transgender health. Many of the speakers actually were co-authors of the standards of care or have held leadership positions within the W-Path organization. So the things that they're saying carry a lot of weight and do, you know, impact, impact what's the care that's being given at your pediatrician's office. I mean, one of the things that, one of the presentations that really stuck out to me was talking about puberty. blockers. And this one doctor discussed how, you know, puberty blockers, we know that it's impacting a child's calcium storage. So when a child's going through puberty up into their mid-20s is the time where the body is storing calcium that's going to be needed so that you don't develop osteoporosis later. So we know that kids who are on puberty blockers are at risk for osteoporosis because they're

not getting those calcium storage they need. One of the interesting admissions was about, we're talking about how we don't really know the impact of puberty blockers on brain development. Puberty blockers are sold as this very totally reversible treatment, but in reality, when you're stopping puberty, you know, puberty isn't just about your sex organs, your reproductive organ is developing. The whole body is developing. So we don't know what's happening to a child's brain. And then in the same, this is the same doctor. One of the things that really, that's really stuck with me was speaking about how telling doctors that they need to allow boys to get as close to the line basically of going into puberty before they block it because when you put a child on

puberty blockers, it stops the growth of their genital tissue. And he was making the point that these boys, 11-year-old boys, are quote-unquote growing their vagina. So they're growing the tissue that they'll need if they want to have a surgery to create a neo-vagina. when they turn 18. And just hearing that, it really kind of, I mean, it really upsets me personally. I'm a mom of two children. It upsets me to hear that. But then I think it really shows how all of these things are connected from the socially transitioning, which would be maybe using different pronouns or calling a child by a different name to the medicalization, to the surgery. It's a very clear pass. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Michaela Estruth here with Megan Brock. She writes

for the Daily Caller News Foundation, and we are discussing her recent investigation into the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or W-Path, and the realities of sex change and medical procedures. So, Megan, continuing on in your article, you discussed the doctors addressing mental health issues, and then I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. Do they see this gender-affirming care as a mental health issue, or do they segregate them? No, I mean, I think people need to understand that, you know, foundationally, what the whole thing is built on this idea that you have a sex and you have a gender identity. That we think about previously, you know, we've always, we always have known that sex is biological.

And gender was a term that was really just used linguistically to describe words, right? Sex, words might have a gender, but human beings have a sex. So the ideology really believes that there's this impiguous idea of gender. identity and that's really your sense of whether you're female or male. So it's completely subjective. So because of that, if you accept that premise that gender identity is real and essentially equal to sex, then you believe that you can actually change your sex. So all that to say that we heard several doctors speaking about how having even like a mental health issue, like, for example, schizophrenia shouldn't necessarily inhibit you from being able to make decisions about

medicalizing yourself towards changing your sex, which we know is impossible. And some of those tapes, there was a whole article specifically about the mental health issues, was really challenged, just kind of upsetting to listen to. It is upsetting to listen to because you think, well, if somebody is a mental health issue like schizophrenia, I mean, how could they possibly really give an informed consent about procedures that are going to be so disrupted to their body. Yeah. Wow. And latching on to that word consent, is there an age in the reports of what is considered minor or can they do this at any age? Yeah. I mean, so I think that the standards of care really kind of eliminated hard ages. In terms of the puberty blockers, I've heard repeatedly as young as

eight. So obviously you're going to block a child's puberty when they're going in before they really go into puberty and Tanner stage two is when it's typically blocked. So children is, young as eight. In terms of cross-sex hormones, I mean, I've definitely heard a lot of reports of teenagers as young as, I think in one of the tapes they discussed maybe like 14 might be an age. And then with the surgeries, the double mastectomies, I mean, we know for a while everyone was like, oh, it's not happening. Well, we know that's happening to kids. There was one study that listed a kid as young as 12, having their, a little girl having her breasts removed. So those are happening. I think in terms of the other surgeries, it's probably more of a case-by-case,

basis. And then also in your article, you discussed FDA-approved drugs but being misapplied. Can you explain what that means? Yeah, so puberty blockers are a great example of this. So they're FDA-approved for precocious puberty. One of the big things about using puberty blockers for precocious puberty is that there's a time frame that you're going to start and end. You know that this is not forever. The doctors are using them in a very specific way. And that was one of the points that was made actually in the W-Path tapes was one of the doctors was actually talking about how we at some point need to get kids on sex hormones and actually making the comment, well, the hormones are binary because they are.

Estrogen and testosterone are binary. They're not. There's no third path. So when people are using puberty blockers for gender distress, it's not FDA approved for that. So there's no real roadmap. There's not, we don't, like I said earlier, we don't really know. what being on these puberty blockers into the teen years, the long-term impact that's having on

brain function, a long-term impact that's having on fertility. I mean, that's another huge piece of this. In one of the videos, someone asked a question about saving the eggs, say, a little girl who is going to have her puberty blocked because that's what a lot of these doctors will say, well, we know we can sperm bank or we can freeze a little girl's eggs. But the issue was brought up that if a child is not really gone through puberty, we don't even know if those eggs would be fertile. So in order for a child to maybe regain their fertility, they're going to have to stop the puberty blocker, stop the cross-sex hormones, go through a female puberty. It's just a whole long thing. And it's just all so unknown and so experimental. Right. So they're basically just

experimenting on kids because we've never, we've never dealt with this, right? I mean, there's, There's so many unknowns. So a lot of these drugs are being off-label. One of the experts we spoke to from Do No Harm said, you know, it's not necessarily incorrect to use drugs off-label, but the assessment, you know, this expert made the point that we really have no roadmap to show that any of this is really necessary or that's really helping kids. There's, I don't know if you're familiar with the cast review, that was published in April

this year recently from the NIH in England. and it really really showed the actual evidence around all of these sex change procedures and kids and show that there really isn't strong evidence at all for any of this. And so as a result, several European countries, England, for example, is stopping the use of puberty blockers, I believe, outside of like kind of like a clinical trial study setting. So a lot of other countries are looking at the evidence and saying, wow, you know, we really need to pause this. unfortunately, we haven't seen that response in the U.S. Okay. And are they addressing that at all?

Did the W.Path at all address that? I believe W.Path put out a statement about the CASA review that was really just kind of questioning the validity of their evidence and of their report, which, you know, this was from the NIH, England's National Health Service. So it wasn't like, you know, it was pretty unbiased. I think that was just looking at the evidence. they've taken a lot more steps to stop this medicalization versus the U.S. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.

I'm Michaela Estruth, and here with me is Megan Brock. She writes for the Daily Caller News Foundation. We've been discussing the recent investigation into the World Professional Association for Transgender Health or W-Path and the realities of sex change and medical procedures. Megan, we were just talking about experimenting on children, essentially. And then in your article, you discuss briefly what they term gender affirming care. And you say it to euphemism. So I was wondering if you could unpack that and what you actually think is going on. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think like I had said earlier, I mean, this really is a battle of language.

You think about, well, what is someone's gender? If gender is used correctly, all it is a way to describe someone's biological sex, someone's sex. I mean, you really can't formulate a definition of gender without just saying, well, actually, it just describes male or female. So this whole idea that you can quote unquote gender affirming care is this idea that you can medically affirm something that's not even real. And we know that in reality we have two sexes, male and female. So I think that's something people really have to think about with the words that we're using. I know it's hard because it's hard sometimes to come up with definitions, but I try to say it's sex change procedures. That's what they're trying to do. They're not trying

to change or affirm anyone's quote-unquote gender. You're trying to change someone's sex. They're trying to tell a little boy, you can be a little girl, tell a young woman, you can be a young man. And we, without any studies, know that that's not possible. So that's why I would say it. The term is really gender affirming care is a euphemism. There's, in my opinion, there's caring about this and gender is this very subjective construct whereas someone's sex is objective is real it's the same no matter throughout time and space right and just going into your article and it's released has there been a response from w path at all um not to my knowledge no i don't think they've they responded to that wow okay so you've done all this research and

released these videos and do you think they're even aware of it I mean, we reached out to them multiple times. Wow. You know, obviously trying to see if they could offer some clarification. Personally, I didn't get, I think my colleague Kate had gotten a response from one doctor. I didn't get, did not really get any response or any statement from anyone. You've mentioned a lot of specifics from the videos. Are there any others that come to mind that were just shocking to you or that you had not any prior knowledge about that you would want to share?

I think one of the most shocking things was learning about the surgeries. So the surgery, vaginoplasty, is when the surgeons attempt to create a fake vagina called a neo-vigina for boys. This surgery basically leaves a patient with a wound that they have to actually dilate for the rest of their lives or it is going to close up. And then with the falloplasty procedures, whereas they attempt. to create a fake penis for a woman. One of the slides said the average number of surgeries for someone who has a radial arm

phyloplasty, which is when you take skin from the, take a very, very thick chunk of skin. It's not like my background's in nursing. So when you do like a skin graph, sometimes you'll take just like a very superficial layer of skin. This is taking like a very, very thick piece of tissue. And then they'll use that to create the fake penis. And the one slide said it's as many, the average is six different surgery. It's a surgical series because they're doing so many things to this person's body and there's a very high complication rate.

I mean, as they one surgeon said, it might be as high as I believe it was 80%. I mean, you think about that and they're also with the phalloplasty, one of the big complications is that is a narrowing of the urethra. So that's where you excrete urine from your body. Well, excreting urine from your body is essential to living. If you're not doing that, then you know, you're going to have a toxin build up and you're going to die. That's why people have to go on dialysis because they're not able to filter the toxins out of their body. So the idea that we're taking people who have healthy bodies but are struggling with an element of their mental health. And we're taking their healthy bodies and we're really taking the way their healthy function, medicalizing them.

and then really putting them on this path where they're going to be in need of the health care system for the rest of their lives in various ways. I mean, it's just, to me, it's just so the opposite of healthcare and surgical care. You know, the whole goal is I talked to Dr. Eitonheim, and he spoke about how the whole goal of surgery, he's a surgeon, is to restore function. And so when you see these procedures, they're really taking away some functioning that is essential to to human beings. Right. And it's just fascinating also that you have a background in nursing. So do you have any personal stories or like remembrance from your time as a nurse and how that compares to what you're seeing now in the medical field? I mean, I think it's, when I look at what's going on,

I mean, I worked in pediatrics and I worked in pediatric intensive care, which is really difficult. And I had so many amazing colleagues and saw firsthand, it really takes a special type of to care for very sick children and seeing these doctors and nurses and various health professionals give so much of themselves to care for children. It genuinely makes me sad to see how these kind of like transgender activists have co-opted health care because it's really making people, rightly so, I think, are a lot of parents. I know myself, you know, as a parent, it's kind of hard to trust institutions that have been so highly respected. And I think that's really really sad because it in some ways it's kind of undermining all the excellent work that our health

care workers and our doctors and our surgeons are doing every single day. And I think that, you know, I feel for, for, I think there's a lot of people within the medical community who don't agree with this, but they're very afraid to speak up because they don't want to lose their job. They don't want to lose their medical license. I mean, there's a, a whole rabbit hole you can go down with that in terms of the potential consequences. So I hope. that more and more people, particularly within the medical field, are able to say, you know, we need to stop doing this to children because it's wrong to cut the healthy breasts off of a 14-year-old girl. I mean, I don't, all these studies aside, I just think most people, when you

put it like that, understand, like, yeah, we shouldn't be giving teenagers procedures that might sterilize them. I mean, you wouldn't give, you wouldn't give a healthy male, a teenage male, vasectomy, right? Because you understand that a teenager can't grasp even when it's like to be a parent. So I really hope that we'll see more people within the medical profession speaking up about this. Well, Megan, those are all the questions I have. Do you have any final thoughts or anything else to share that I haven't addressed? No, I just invite people if they want to read our reporting. You can go to wpath tapes.com. And then we also have on our YouTube channel the full sessions, all these educational sessions that we reported on and they're they're really interesting if you have some time

and you want to learn more about this ideology and what's said behind closed doors it's definitely worth to listen well thank you me megam for joining us i really appreciate it yeah thank you so much for having me yeah absolutely you've been listening to radio free hillsdale 101.7 fm i'm michela estruth and i was just with megan brock she's a writer for daily caller news foundation for her work and the article that we were discussing you can visit daily caller dot com Thank you.